Introduction

Defqon 1 Festival 2019, endshow

Chordogram

Computational Musicology Portfolio

Welcome to my portfolio for Computational Musicology.

This specific kind of EDM is by most people described as 'loud-', 'predominant music' or 'just noize'. One could say that due to it's rather intense nature it's not the most popular genre. Although there are a number of large festivals dedicated with this music style, among them Defqon.1, Dominator and Thunderdome.

Usually harder styles music is referred to 'hardstyle', 'hardcore' or 'gabber' but the terms are used haphazerdly, to the annoyance of many true fans in the community. This style of music offers a few subgenres that are distinguishable based on the tempo, melody and energy of the song. But these styles evolve and influence eachother over time. Thus it could be difficult to determine how a style truly is defined. But for at this moment, different subgenres for example are hardstyle, frenchcore, jump. Spotify doesn't distinguish between the styles yet (all harder styles are found under EDM) and admittedly sometimes the line between the subgenres is a bit arbitrary. But by only hearing a song it's possible to recognize it's style and even artist. Also, Spotify is able to do that too! As the algorithm is able to recommend harder styles songs. One could argue there is an objective basis to be defined to order the harder styles tracks into subgenres. This course would be a great moment to find that out.

Some variables that would be interesting to look at are energy, tempo and valence. In my portfolio I am going to try and establish a profile for some of the most recognized harder styles in the community. In two ways this will be done. I'll be comparing harder styles music with other Western music styles and with other subgenres. Using the hardstyle wiki I'll look at characteristics of these genres and see whether these hold up. There genres that are considered in this portfolio are; happy hardcore, euphoric hardstyle, raw hardstyle, mainstream hardcore, industrial hardcore and where things get really crazy; uptempo. The page colors correspond to the stages of defqon 1 where these respective genres are played (more or less).

The second page is harder styles compared to other music. On the third page are subgenres considered apart from one another and this is summarized on the last page.

Plot 2